On this day 95 years ago, Nikolay Aleksandrovich, the Romanov tsar of Russia, was executed by Red Guards in the cellar of a sprawling house in the frontier city of Yekaterinburg. Opposing forces of the White Army had been seen within a couple of days of the city, and the Bolsheviks, fearing that he might be freed from the captivity to which he had been subjected since the revolution a year earlier, ordered that Nicholas II be killed. Pravda reported tersely the next day, “Nicholas Romanov has been executed. His family has been evacuated to a safe location.”

Nicholas II and his family, 1905. Credit: The Granger Collection, New York

That was not true. On the night of July 16–17, 1918, the Romanovs were awakened and told they were being evacuated. Instead, they were led into the cellar of the house where they had been held since April. There, they were shot, bludgeoned, and bayoneted. The dead numbered Nicholas, his wife Alexandra (the German-born granddaughter of Queen Victoria of England), and their five children: Olga (22), Tatiana (21), Maria (19), Anastasia (17), and Alexei (13). Killed, too, were four family servants—a doctor, cook, butler, and maid—so that, presumably, they would not report the executions to the outside world.

In the decade that followed, rumors began to circulate that Pravda was telling the truth after all—or, in any event, that one and possibly more of the Romanovs had survived, including Alexei and especially Anastasia, whose remains, it was said, were not found with her kin after the Whites captured Yekaterinburg in 1919. Not long after it was reported that the Romanovs had tucked a tidy emergency fund away in a Swiss bank, a woman emerged from the shadows to claim that she, in fact, was Anastasia. Her claim to the fortune was denied only years later, after she was revealed to be a Polish commoner, a ruling reinforced by a posthumous DNA test that proved that she had none of the genetic markers of the Romanov family.

That story was intriguing enough that in 1955 a French play about Anastasia became a hit Hollywood film starring Yul Brynner, himself a Russian exile, and Ingrid Bergman, who played her layered part so convincingly that the belief of Anastasia’s survival became even more commonplace.

The Soviet government forever held silent about the facts of the matter, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union the new government of Russia opened an investigation into the execution of the Romanovs. That investigation would last for nearly 20 years, culminating in a substantial archive of evidence, including documents, DNA analysis, and forensic proof. Meanwhile, on July 17, 1998, Nicholas, Alexandra, and three of their daughters were reinterred in Saint Petersburg. The bodies of two other members of the family, Maria and Alexei, were positively identified a decade later; they had been buried in a separate grave from the mass one containing the other nine victims. Just as the Bolsheviks feared 95 years ago, they all now stand as emblems for a resurgent monarchist movement, yet another of history’s small ironies.